When Montana Gov. Brian Schweizer whacked Mitt Romney as descending from a Mexican "polygamy commune," the Obama White House distanced itself from the remarks, but Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake found them instructive, that "despite Schweitzer’s overly blunt and inartful phrasing, it’s worth looking at the broader point he was trying to make.The truth is that Romney should be able to draw on his personal history for ammunition to fight back on issues such as the Latino vote and his image as a fat-cat businessman. But in both cases, fighting back would require reminding people that he’s a Mormon." What a pickle.

Blake, who is a well-known digger for "outlandish" Republican dirt, did not find a great "broader point" like James Taranto on Friday, noting that if that partisan from Montana wanted to mock an exotic foreign polygamist, he should perhaps look at -- Barack Obama's daddy:

[Barack] Obama's father, who apparently converted to Catholicism while attending a Roman Catholic school, was also polygamous in keeping with local custom, taking an informal Kenyan wife who preceded Obama's mother but remained a consort, according to accounts by local people and the senator himself.

That quote comes from that right-wing birther maniac Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who visited Obama Sr.'s childhood village of Kogelo, Kenya, in December 2008. Kristof fretted:

Frankly, I worry that enemies of Obama will seize upon details like his grandfather's Islamic faith or his father's polygamy to portray him as an alien or a threat to American values. But snobbishness and paranoia ill-become a nation of immigrants, where one of our truest values is to judge people by their own merits, not their pedigrees.

Not to mention the pedigrees of their supper! Which is actually very much a related point. The Obama campaign and its surrogates have shown an amazing inability to anticipate the ways in which their attacks on Romney backfire against their own man.

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